Marilyn Pappano - Detective On The Hunt

Don’t get confrontational with a cop who is armed. One of her personal rules. With a thin but notoriously compliant smile, she said, “I appreciate the escort, Officer. Okay if I make a U-turn?”

His response was a slight tilt of his head.

As she started the engine, he stepped back, then returned to his vehicle, a huge black pickup truck emblazoned with the usual police stickers. A drug forfeiture? Or was Cedar Creek more generous with its police budget than Evanston, where her official car was a beater practically as old as she was?

The thud of Foster’s door sounded through her window as she shifted into Drive. The house holding her interest was the last one on this lonely street. Its nearest neighbor was half a block behind her, and the street ahead ended a hundred feet past its driveway, the pavement abruptly chopped and blocked to traffic with steel barriers. She’d intended to drive up there when she left, to use the driveway to turn around. To see whether there was a gate, any obvious security system, possibly a security guard.

She would have to come back to find out. This job required a face-to-face visit with Maura Evans, and JJ never left a job undone.

There were no curbs on the sides of the street, the newly greening grass growing right up to the concrete. Her Challenger didn’t require a lot of room to turn around. Frustrated, though, that the locals knew she was here—and pretty sure it was Chadwick who’d told them—she vented by expanding what should have been an easy three-point turn into five or six points.

“Yeah, no passive-aggressiveness in you, Detective Logan,” she murmured as she drove past the scowling Officer Foster with a half-hearted wave and back down the block.

She’d seen nothing worth seeing in her hour at the house Maura was renting, unless she counted the cat sunning on the patio table. Funny. She remembered Maura as a fierce dog lover with no interest in felines whatsoever. Granted, that was over fifteen years ago, and Maura had been a little kid. She’d changed, like all little kids did when they grew up, and JJ knew next to nothing about the woman she’d become.

Except that, according to the Evans family lawyer, she’d gotten lost in her grief after her parents’ deaths. She’d closed up the family mansion and hit the road in the überexpensive Mercedes that had been their last gift to her, and six months ago she’d settled in Cedar Creek. Three months ago she’d cut off all contact with her past life.

And now JJ was here to make sure everything was okay with her. According to Chadwick, she’d been his first choice to look into the matter. If she didn’t detest the man so much—and if he didn’t detest her even more—she might have taken that as a compliment. But she knew better. From his first day on the job, he’d made it clear that women had no place in his department and certainly not in his detective squad. The only problem: he couldn’t fire her without cause, and she was damn well determined not to give it to him.

Which left him one option: making things bad enough that she would quit. He’d alternated between assigning her cases so simple a brain-dead squirrel could close them and ones so lacking in evidence they would stump Sherlock Holmes, Columbo and Steve McGarrett combined. He nitpicked everything she did and everything she didn’t do. He disrespected her within the department and encouraged the real officers—read: male—to do the same. Publicly he was gracious, but privately he made her work life hell.

He hadn’t realized he was butting heads with the most stubborn person in town. JJ intended to outlast him, and the odds were in her favor. He’d come to Evanston after retiring from a small North Carolina police department. He was seventy-two, believed fervently in the Southern food adage If it ain’t fried, it ain’t done , drank like a fish and had high cholesterol, heart disease and high blood pressure. Sooner or later, he would retire again or die, and she would be there to wave him off—or throw the first shovel of dirt into his grave.

With a surprised look around, she realized she’d driven the few miles to the police station without noticing. When she’d worked traffic, she’d made a small fortune for the city of Evanston writing tickets to inattentive drivers, and now she didn’t remember how she’d gotten here.

Officer Foster in his big truck followed her to a parking space, left a couple of empty spots between them, then got out and met her at the rear of the vehicles. Though the morning had started off nippy, it had turned into a glorious March day. Things were greening, coming back to life. The sun was warm, and she would swear she could smell the fresh, sweet, woodsy fragrance of the flowers thirty yards ahead of them.

Unless… She weaved a bit closer to Officer Foster and surreptitiously took a deep breath. Yep, it was him, not the flowers. The scent made her mouth water and her stomach do a little butterfly twirl. Lovely, lovely.

There might be an upside to this gig, after all.

Probably in defense of her gleaming little car, Jennifer Jo Logan—JJ, Quint reminded himself—had parked at the farthest end of the lot from the station, six or eight spaces from the next nearest vehicle. Though she was half a foot shorter than him, she matched his strides without complaint. He was long out of the habit of slowing down to accommodate anyone with shorter legs— Don’t think of Linny —but now he made a conscious effort to shorten his steps.

Which gave him an opportunity to study JJ.

From a purely professional viewpoint.

She would have to stand on tiptoe to pass five foot six, and she was slender, curvy, soft, but she had an assured don’t-mess-with-me air about her. Her hair fell to her shoulders, nothing special, brown with a few reddish streaks, and her eyes were hazel, again nothing special.

And somehow, in spite of all that nothing special, she was pretty. Not beautiful, not the sort who would stop guys in their tracks, not like—

His jaw tightened, and he forced the thought to its conclusion: not like Linny. Linny had been gorgeous, with silky black hair that fell straight and sleek to her waist, skin so pale it might have never seen the sun, delicate and fragile and breathtaking.

JJ Logan wasn’t any of that. But neither was any other woman in the world.

Quint was comfortable with silence—had made himself become comfortable—but not so much her. It wasn’t more than a minute before she spoke. “How long have you been a cop?”

“A while.”

“You a local boy?”

“Yeah.”

“You like patrol?”

He lifted one shoulder in a shrug, realized she wasn’t looking and grunted instead.

An annoyed tone came into her voice. “Is your chief good, bad or indifferent?”

As if any cop who cared about his job would honestly answer that question from a stranger. Sam was damned good—Quint wouldn’t have a job if he wasn’t—but if the truth was one of the other two answers, no way he’d admit it. “Good.”

He thought he heard a sigh from her in response, but when she didn’t respond, he turned his attention to the police station ahead of them. The building was three stories, constructed of huge blocks of sandstone, with broad concrete steps leading to the double doors. More than a hundred years old, its purpose wasn’t just function; it provided beauty and solidity, elegance and grace—a quote from the city’s tourism brochure. It had been built to last, and it gave him a sense of…

He wasn’t sure how to identify the feeling. He’d spent sixteen months learning to ignore feelings, and it was hard, once a habit formed, to give it up again. Satisfaction wasn’t quite the right label. Neither was comfort. Security, maybe. It had stood there strong and whole his entire life, and it would still be there, strong and whole, long after he died. Unchanging. Constant.